E-Discovery Initiatives at SharePoint and ...Google?

This year, for the first time, Duguid and other members of the SharePoint team at Microsoft have joined EDRM, Socha says, which means they're helping other members develop the framework.

Duguid says the framework is useful for customers and that Microsoft wants to be involved so it doesn't end up on the receiving end of a defacto industry standard.

Getting information out of SharePoint is a big market for whoever figures out how to do it, Socha says. He says he knows of several companies that are working on the problem. Some of them are Microsoft SharePoint partners, according to Duguid.

Finkelman also expects Google to contribute to the e-discovery problem as it gets more corporate clients for its business software, but Socha sees problems with e-discovery as symptoms of a larger problem -- the fact that few companies have their electronic houses in order. "They don't know what data they're creating or where they're putting it," he says.

So he's launched another framework -- the Information Management Reference Model -- to help companies find and organize all the information they have.